The program concentrates on the immune system in health and disease, with a focus on autoimmune diseases (e.g. rheumatic diseases, psoriasis, inflammatory bowel diseases), lymphoid organ development, immunodeficiencies, allergy and transplant rejection, and has three distinctive features:

1) Clinical and epidemiological research, in which innovative use of novel imaging approaches are used to follow inflammatory disease process in patients. The development of biomarkers is seen as important tools for measuring the inflammatory process at the tissue level (“liquid biopsy”), as they will be used as predictors of clinical course and response, and are necessary for accurate descriptions of patient characteristics and the relationships between the autoimmune inflammatory processes on the clinical symptoms.

3) its trans-disciplinary nature encompassing similar types of inflammation in different tissues and organs such as bowel (IBD), lung (asthma), skin (psoriasis), vertebral column/joints (spondyloarthritis/arthritis) as well as the multiple organ systems involved in systemic diseases such as systemic lupus erythematosus, systemic sclerosis and vasculitis.

Goal of research program inflammatory diseases

The goal of this program is to advance our understanding of innate and adaptive immune responses, and to obtain a broad knowledge of the immunological abnormalities underlying chronic inflammatory diseases. The obtained knowledge will be used to develop diagnostic and therapeutic strategies for these diseases, and finally, prevention.